


Interim

by MovingPen



Category: Borderlands, Tales from the Borderlands - Fandom
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Kind of a feel trip?, Short, i hope anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-22
Updated: 2016-01-22
Packaged: 2018-05-15 10:44:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5783299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MovingPen/pseuds/MovingPen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Raising the Children of Helios was no easy task. </p><p> </p><p>(In which I cannot believe the game skipped out on so much character development.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Interim

**Author's Note:**

> First chapter is about Vaughn and the Children of Helios.  
> The second will be about Rhys and Atlas, if you guys like this one.

It’s weird at first, Vaughn thinks. He’s looking at the fractured pieces of his old home—no, more than a home; it’s his community, his whole world—downed in flames. He should be sadder, maybe. Digging through rubble to salvage anyone he can.

But he doesn’t.

He watches as the smaller pieces burn up in Pandora’s atmosphere. They’re escape pods that didn’t close properly or hinged doors that snapped off after colliding with some debris in orbit, and it’s weirdly beautiful. Like shooting stars, but up close.

Did Rhys make it? Fiona? Sasha? Yvette? He doesn’t see them, he isn’t looking. He’s not ready to look yet, because it still hasn’t hit him that it’s happened. It hasn’t hit him that he needs to start looking for his friends, because that means he’ll have to admit he might be looking for corpses.

But he doesn’t gawk forever. The flames die down and people are shouting, calling names, screaming, crying. Escape pods are hissing, popping open, spitting up brand-name suits and Hyperion ID tags. Reality, all at once.

“Hey,” He says, voice an afterthought against the cacophony of sound. He tires it again, louder this time. “Hey!”

He slides down one of the large craters left by one of the four wings of Helios, stumbling over his own two feet as he gets to the bottom, “Hey, you can’t eat that,” He says, “You can’t eat dirt, man.”

The man in question is from accounting. He’s wearing the vest that comes standard with the uniform, and he’s got the high-tech glasses to match. Vaughn should know him, probably, but he doesn’t and he’s glad. It’d be kind of be embarrassing.

The man—Vaughn sees his tag reads Horace—lets the dirt fall through his fingers before looking up at Vaughn with a blank expression. He’s definitely got dirt around his mouth, though, which. Well, Vaughn isn’t sure what to think about that.

“Come on, dude,” Vaughn tries to get him to his feet, “You can’t stay here. It’s—it’s dangerous, Pandora’s dangerous.”

Horace doesn’t say anything, but he nods and lets Vaughn get him standing.

Vaughn knows there’s no way he can get this guy out of the crater. He’s too tall (though he’s lifted taller), but the more they walk, the more people he sees. Coughing, sputtering as they slip out of escape pods, taking the first breath of fresh air they might have ever taken.

It’s weird. It’s still weird. Unreal.

Vaughn stops and helps others up, since Horace is able to stand and wait around on his own, and tells them they’re climbing up. They’re getting out of the crater, they’re going to find others, and for the first time in Vaughn’s life, people are doing what he says.

* * *

 

Those next two months are weird too, but a lot more real. The night ends, the fire sputters out, and all that’s left is the jagged metal landscape of what Helios once was. They only ever find bodies these days, and the likelihood of the deceased having a face decreases exponentially as each day passes. People think it’s some sign, and they panic like kids. They think it has some deep meaning.

“It’s just Psychos,” Vaughn tells them after herding them all together, disheveled bunch of survivors that they are, “They’re probably passing through, don’t worry about it.”

Unsurprisingly, everyone worries about it more.

“I said don’t worry about it! Look, I’ll—I’ll go talk to them, okay?”

That gets them to quiet down. Vaughn’s not entirely sure how he’s going to pull it off, but he remembers the derby. He did it then, he can do it now.

He takes a group of five. They’re the most well-adjusted, Vaughn thinks, and if he’s got to fight for his life, he… no, he’s gotta be honest, he’s just pretty sure he could outrun them all. As much as you can take the cog out of Helios, you can’t take the Helios out of the cog.

But thankfully, they don’t have to run. Vaughn could scream about decapitating the salted iron as well as the next guy, and apparently whatever he said roughly translated to ‘howdy friends, get lost! These are our faces!’

Or he hoped so. The whole exchange was something of an enigma.

Regardless, finding the bodies was a lot easier when they still had their faces.

* * *

 

It didn’t bother him so much now, living around the wreckage. It had before because it seemed so endless and senseless; walls of debris and broken glass, towering structures that had once had names and elevators—but now it was home. The Children of Helios had given it purpose again, building from what was left. They found weapons, even if none of them knew how to shoot (Vaughn included). Old electronics that had been burnt up in the descent still had fine wires and circuits, and as incompetent as some of his followers were, a few of them had been engineers before.

It was becoming a city. Or maybe something not quite so complex. Settlement? Tribe? He hoped they weren’t a tribe.

…But he was covered in blood. And wearing a mask. And sometimes they did this weird chanting thing? Not that he was really in on it, but some of the Children of Helios got really into it—

Better idea: don’t think about it too much.

People had already started telling stories of how their settlement had come to be. Late at night by the fire, they’d talk about how Rhys had conquered Handsome Jack all on his own, how their old CEO had tried to take him over, use him to enslave them again, but he refused. He refused because he was a righteous man, a rarity in Hyperion, and—

Vaughn had to interject.

“He didn’t do it alone,” Vaughn said, “I was there with him the whole time. I saw him go up to Helios.”

He didn’t know what had happened while Rhys was on board, but it was easy to believe he’d done the right thing. It was easy to believe that he’d made that sacrifice so Helios and Hyperion could be over, but Vaughn wasn’t sure if he _could._ He let everyone else believe it, though, because he decided Rhys deserved to be remembered for his triumphs and not his mistakes.

It got out of hand, sure. Rhys became a Martyr, their savior, liberator, and—

“He’s not dead,” Vaughn blurted out one day, digging through mechanical refuse as a few others talked excitedly about the possibility of finding something that had belonged to Rhys among the wreckage, “He made it out. I know he did.”

Which started a far worse rumor; Rhys would come back, they said. He’d come back and build something better than Helios.

Vaughn let them believe that. He let them believe that because he wanted it to be true, too.

* * *

When someone brings Vaughn Rhys’s arm, he can’t stand. It’s Hyperion yellow, spattered with red, yanked from the socket, dented and rusted from disuse. The joints are locked tight, tense, and Vaughn can’t ask what he wants to ask.

They say they didn’t find him.

And that makes it okay, because there’s still a _possibility._ He can hope.

The arm finds a place in Vaughn’s quarters, leaned up against the wall, even though he knows it’s unlikely. He knows more about Rhys’s cybernetics than Rhys does; he went to all the seminars with Rhys, read all the manuals, and he knows exactly how much Rhys would bleed if the port is ripped open. He knows exactly which artery it’d tear.

But they didn’t find Rhys, and they don’t, day after day after day, and it gets easier.

* * *

A year goes by. He’s moved on, he thinks. Everyone listens to him now, he’s their leader, and the Children of Helios are rooted. They keep out bandits and Psychos with laser pointers and tributes mounted on sticks (it’s Psycho-speak), and people are smiling and laughing again. Rhys has a statue, even if it doesn’t look a thing like him, and Vaughn’s distanced himself from the concept.

Rhys, his best friend, is probably dead.

He was brave, and fought a man that killed millions. He _won._ Vaughn couldn’t have been more proud.

But Rhys the martyr, the man in the legends, is very much alive. He’s not a man Vaughn knows; Rhys , his best friend, was selfish. Sometimes he was a dick. He was afraid of heights and got motion-sick on the elevator between floors on Helios and Vaughn helped him lie and steal and embezzle his way to the top. He was too tall and sometimes he talked too much.

The Rhys that everyone was going to remember was none of those things. He would be an under-dog Hyperion stooge that single-handedly hunted down and destroyed the last vestige of Handsome Jack all on his own. Fiona and Sasha would be forgotten. Vaughn would have a place in the legend at the tail end when they talked about the Children of Helios and the crash.

So Vaughn wrote it all down, just for himself, just to remember it. In case anyone ever asked what the _real_ story was, he could hand it over. In case anyone ever wondered what he’d never said, but had wanted to.

No one ever asks what the real story was, but he's glad he has a copy. Just in case.

* * *

 

The Rhys that sits across from him now, after all this time, isn’t the same Rhys he’d said goodbye to almost a year and a half ago. Vaughn doesn't know what he was expecting, now that he thinks about it. He'd stopped expecting much of anything after a while, but even when he did think about it, what it'd be like to see him again (alive, even), it wasn't ever like this. Rhys’s fidgety, Vaughn notices, and his looks are flashy. His hair’s longer, still gelled back (Vaughn doesn’t ask what he’s using for product), and sometimes he laughs for no good reason. Sometimes he does things he shouldn’t, just on impulse, and it reminds him of someone they both used to know, and Vaughn worries. He's only been staying with them for a few days, and he's worrying.   
  
He finally gets a chance to talk to him alone, away from all the other survivors, and it's even stranger.  _Rhys_ is a stranger. Maybe it's because he hasn't seen him in so long, or that he's changed so much, but he doesn't want either to be true. 

“I thought you were dead, bro.” Vaughn says. It’s the third time he’s said it since he brought Rhys back to the Children of Helios, but this time it feels like he’s really _telling_ him. Admitting he’d given up. “You’ve got to tell me everything that happened.”

He stands up from the small table, digs around in one of the drawers off to the side, and sits back down with the book in hand. Rhys’s story, their story, the chronicles of the Vault of the Traveler, everything he’d remembered. He crosses out the last paragraph, running his pen over ‘the end’ no less than five times.

“How’d you—how’d you even survive?”

And Vaughn watches as Rhys furrows his brow, and eyes (one real, brown, and one metal, gold) flicker back and forth to try and pull the pieces back together.

**Author's Note:**

> I thank you very much for reading, and I hope you enjoyed this quick fic! If you enjoyed it, leave a comment below! It means the world to me, and spurs the good ole' writing horse.


End file.
